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Implementation of Shimmer Effect in Layouts in SUSI.AI Android App

The shimmer effect was created by Facebook to indicate the loading of data in pages where data is being loaded from the internet. This was created as an alternative for the existing ProgressBar and the usual loader to give better user experience with UI.

Let’s get started to see how we can implement it. Here, I am going to use SUSI.AI (a smart assistant app) as a reference app to show a code demonstration. I am working on this project in my GSoC period and while working I found the need to implement this feature in many places. So, I am writing this blog to share my experience with how, I implemented it in the app.

First of all, we need to add the shimmer dependency in the app level Gradle file.

Now, we need to create a placeholder layout simply by using views. This placeholder should resemble the actual layout. Usually, grey-colored is preferred in the placeholder background. A placeholder should not have any text written. It should be viewed only. Let’s consider the placeholder used in susi.

Now let’s have a glance at the actual items whose placeholders we have made.

Now, after the creation of the placeholder, we need to add this placeholder in the main layout file. It is done in the following way:

Here, I have added the placeholders 6 times so that the entire screen gets covered up. You can add it as many times as you want.

The next and the final task is to start and stop the shimmer effect according to the logic of the code. Here, the shimmer starts as soon as the fragment is created and stops when the data is successfully loaded from the server. Have a look at how to create the reference.

First of all, we need to create a reference to the shimmer. Then we use this reference to start/stop the shimmer effect. Here, in Kotlin we can directly use the id used in layout without creating any reference.

We start the shimmer effect simply by using startShimmer() function in the shimmer reference.

Similarly, we can stop it using stopShimmer() function in the reference.